Facebook released some impressive updates to its ubiquitous social platform at last week's F8 developer conference. It also managed to scare the pants off even the most ardent Facebook admirers. Like me.
But the fear, at least in my case, is less about Facebook's relentless invasion of users' privacy, and more about how its …

Hmm

The reality is..

The reality is that people, most of the time, don't give a crap what their friends are up to, let alone the 2000+ 'friends' some amass in their profile. Facebook will also soon find out that most people are stupid and that, no matter how nice and shiny that toy was, they will want a new toy at some point. They will play with the other toys available until there are none left but the stinky crappy built ones like Diaspora.

Actually...

Too many developers

That's it, really. The company has far too many programmers on staff. They needed the army during the ramp-up phase, but not anymore. The platform works, supports nearly a billion users and does everything it needs to do. Now those under-utilized geeks have solved all the hard problems and are spending their days hacking away on cool new ideas. These inevitably end up in the product, over-burdening it with ever more complex and pointless things.

My John Harvey-Jones fix: bin 90% of the programmers (pay them a million each), keep a small team to maintain and slowly extend the core, and leave it at that. After all, once your house is finished you don't keep the builders and architects on retainer, but you might hire in a decorator once in a while. Lots of those laid-off, rich hackers will start new businesses around the edge of the FB ecosystem, strengthening the platform with optional features while leaving the core intact and lean.

Won't happen while Zuckerberg is in charge. He's a hacker himself, at heart so he won't kill his own kind. He also seems to combine the greed of a Lucas with Job's need for control.

Ignore, Retry or Abort.

Bye bye FB and hello Google+

I stripped my FB account of all "likes" and other personal information then submitted an account deletion request and deactivated my account. FSCK FB!! Its overreaching desire to snatch everything about me and its continuous introduction of new "features" that are turned on by default. So far, I'm finding Google+ pleasant and easy to use. Only problem is most of my real friends and personal acquaintances are still on FB :-( At least G+ allows sharing your posts with non-users via email.

Moving from one devil to another

So rather than trusting one ad-supported company, you are now trusting another. And what make you think that Google won't just add on more crap later? They do have a track record for adding 'features' to everything.

Google seems to have learned

Well, let's face it: they're success was based on being less cluttered and useless than Altavista and Yahoo had become. They added relatively discretely onto it and maintained separate platforms. Then they got seduced by the "social web" and gave birth to the brown slurry of "Buzz" and "Wave" and even their most ardent champions soon found that all the vaunted advantages were just new ways to waste time and that newsnet was more fun anyway.

Google+ seems to be deliberately understated in a bending-over-backwards way to please those early adopters amongst us likely not just to post about our frustration but also to call the cops, or in the case of Germany, set up a political party just to keep tabs on them. I suspect that they have learnt an awful lot about how *little* they need to know about individuals in order to be able to monetise it and that the 500 posts a day crowd probably aren't worth tracking.

Farcebook can't go away fast enough.

heh I liked face book when it was just a stream of shit my mates and various interest groups / fangroups posted in chronological order.

Until the latest update at least you could click on the normal "show me all my shit in chronological order" button even though facebook kept insisting you wanted to see "news", sorry, I don't go there for news, and the bollocks we all talk on a day to day basis isn't news.

But anyway, no great loss. Still have twitter for a never ending source of meandering jibbering consciousness.

Left years ago...

I recall joining Facebook to keep up with family, most my friends were on other social networks.

It was fun for about 5 minutes, until I kept getting pestered.

People came out of the woodwork, some I'd had no contact with for 20 years. "Hey, remember at school when?" "Erm, no, I've moved on, forgot that."

The main 'social' aspect seemed to be data gathering games "Will you allow this application to grab all your Facebook details in order to demonstrate to friends how clever you are?" "Erm, no. My friends don't care about that crap."

But some of them did, "Friend X scored 1200 points in 'cool game Y', can you beat them?"

"Erm no, Friend X just gave away all their personal details to a marketing company."

It's crock, it's been crock for years.

I guess, like a true alpha geek, I'm just an unsocial bastard who prefers a small group of friends and chatting face to face. I'm a sucker for Twitter, because I follow people who provide humour & good links. Google+ - yeah, got on it months back, posted my usual pile of silly jokey crud and funny photo's, got bored with it.

The reality is, the social web is what you make it, not what a website *wants* you to make it.

Facebook is a marketing tool masquerading as a friend hangout. Google+ is a wannabe Facebook designed to peddle Google's ad network - and gather personal data.

People came out of the woodwork, some I'd had no contact with for 20 years. "Hey, remember at school when?" "Erm, no, I've moved on, forgot that."

------

You're under no obligation to accept anyone's "friend" request you know. I've got a grand total of something like 30+ friends on Facebook - except for about 5 (who I've met on online games, forums or even on random shit on Facebook itself) all of them are people I know offline.

If I get a request from someone where I think "yeah, I vaguely remember the name but really, who the hell are you?" - then I just ignore the request. Ignored loads from people I probably knew in school - I've done way too much crap since then to remember them.

The new "home feed" on Facebook is, however, pretty crappy - and it's no longer actually easy to navigate Facebook or find anything... I have absolutely no idea where to look now for a list of things that I've "liked".

Well said!

Cynical point of view...

By increasing the amount of effort required by the average user to get Facebook the way they like it, Facebook is not increasing the barrier to entry, but the barrier to exit. Think about it, they know their growth is plateauing, what they need is a good reason for people not to leave. The idea of having to get everything organized just so elsewhere is probably more daunting than the negatives of staying. Sort of like boiling a frog.

freaking FB

I block notices for some app or game and a week later I get the same freaking notices.. I don't want or care if someone's farm needs water.. I don't wanna play games and I want no apps slurping my data on FB. I want to block them all!

I also don't care if my Sister likes her ex-boyfriend's roommate's cousin sister's half-brother wall post of a cat so now I have to unsubscribe all likes and comments from each and everyone of my FB friends. They need a global switch for these things

unsubscribe

Facebook tracking

Assuming Facebook's off-line tracking is real, which I don't, then they are probably using some sort of persistent cookie. And who in his/her right mind still has the browser set to NOT clear all cookies when closing?

That's a valid point, but...

... the majority of the criticism is directed at the increasingly excessive and intrusive sharing of new facebook features, which range from the creepy (people knowing what I read on the paper? shall I just publish my vote then?) to the downright dangerous (anyone using "places" is asking to get burgled).

So while it is certainly true that not everyone who uses facebook is a moron, people who use it excessively are relegated to that status by their ignorance.

And yes the settings are pretty complex. I spent an hour customizing them when they changed a few months ago and I shudder to think what I'll need to do now to figure out the new circles and how to block all kinds of websites from publishing what I'm reading or doing online.

God I hope not

Let me clarify... The closest I get to facebook is "failbook", which satyrizes and spotlights all of the general stupidity that some FB users can exhibit. Nothing brings me more pleasure or gives me more hours of entertainment than watching people embarass the hell out of themselves.

Be it through the magic of updating their status, via their cell phone, that has an over aggressive spell checker.

Or the relentless and brutal trolling that makes the Reg forums look like a completely non-dysfunctional family's weekly dinner.

So, before anybody complains about the invasiveness of all the new FB changes, please take a moment and think about me and my lone selfish indulgence of watching FB users make cannon fodder out of themselves.

Can a British person tell me the answer?

How come British people and politicians, even secret service doesn't ask BBC what the hell are they doing adding that spying button of facebook on one of the largest (if not the largest) and most prestigious sites of the planet?

I am shocked to see that spyware button at news stories, politics etc. Funny and tragic thing is, potentially, a wiretapping government can even identify who (yes, with real name!) reads that "bad" story about them.

If I was a British tax paying person, I would sure be curious about the mysterious reason that button popped up on a very critical news site.

You'll note the BBC button is actually implemented quite differently than the others and thus doesn't track in the same way. Only once you actually click the bugger to share something does it contact FB.

Much as I want to stick up for them though they probably did it for performance reasons rather than privacy concerns.

I'll name a useful feature they could work on...

Totally agree with the article that I don't want to know what everyone is up to all the time. Page likes? Who cares?

My problem is that some friends are extremely FB-chatty so always end up in the wall. And everyone else needs to be scrolled to.

I've hidden a few entirely, but what I would like instead is a feature that said "show only x% of Joe's posts". With me lowering the x till the volume of Joe's chattering updates is bearable.

Additionally, I find some of my French buddies are picking up on English language FB malware several weeks after they've been outed. ex: the "how many people have viewed your profile today" snagged someone this weekend.

How hard is it in a web platform to stop propagation of a known malware? Ditch the army of programmers, lock it down and stop pushing pointless "innovation".

faszbook

It's only just been getting traction here (hungary) over the last year or so, and already known as 'faszbook' ie the hipper crew are getting bored and annoyed. (http://translate.google.com/?hl=en&tab=wT#hu|en|fasz%20book)

Google+ Popular with the geeks?

As far as I can tell all the geeks went there early then got bored with it and left. They're back on facebook now.

That's not to say they won't switch again, but clearly it wasn't compelling enough to make a one-time switch immediately.

Me, I can't use it as my Google Apps for Domains account cannot also be used for Google+, until they fix some stuff. And if I register a throwaway account I'd just have to get set up all over again when they do fix it. Bah.

A total incoherent mess

Speaking as an active programmer with over 25 years experience in EVERYTHING from embedded all the way up to high level mush like the current markup ("Pick a random word and stick ML after it, then mention XML so you sound like you know something, and THEN get the word 'stylesheet' in there somewhere too) mess (folks, its a mess, its a real, real mess and I dont care if it pays your mealticket, its not comp.sci its just shyte):

Speaking as that - FB's interface always was a complete, unintuitive pile of dogs vomit and continues to be. This usually doesn't matter, people get used to interfaces no matter how bad they are (Apple's ancient crappy desktop, Blackberry's godawful GUI, the total mess of GNOME, the dreadful changes in KDE 4, etc etc).

But familiarity doesn't imply quality - FB's interface is very low quality. And its app API is a joke.

but there's a disconnect...

Sorry, but I think you've got bit of a disconnect in your argument. Whether or not you think JavaScript is shite and assembler kicks ass, has little relevance to the quality of the UI. Ultimately the UI is the end product of WHATEVER underlying technology you use to render it and is the result of how you design it, not the languages/frameworks you use.

Yes, the choice between the type of app (web, desktop, console, etc.) may introduce certain constraints and require certain choices, but I'm sure you've seen crap UI in desktop apps as well as the current "high level mush" that is typically used for web development. If it is indeed "mush" is not to do with the use of JavaScript, but how JavaScript was used.

Great article

Couldn't agree more

I've been on FaceBook since day one, I was a beta tester - an early adopter. But year by year, month by month I've become less fond of it.

What was once a lean, well connected and easy way to message my friends and look at their photos has become a bloated mess with gangster games, music updates, video updates, pointless questions, a IM system that won't close, a constant feed in the corner of nonsense.

I've removed everyone but my family from FaceBook now, and choose to use Twitter and Google+ - they're just so much quicker and lighter.

Surprised

I'm surprised to learn that a bunch of so-called geeks use facebook through the facebook website. I genuinely thought everyone with any technical nouse had stopped using that POS a long time ago. I have a close network of about 50 friends and family on there and I just read the news through Freindcaster. I know there are loads and loads of other options out there but I'm not a big user so I stick to what I know. Plenty of friends have much better alternatives but I'm not interesred enough to try them. Hardly anyone actually uses Facebook though.

Facebook is just a bunch of APIs that allow you to access the data you want how you want. I find it incredible a bunch of so-called geeks don't get that.